Virginia company to build $1.2 billion Panhandle wind farm

Wind turbines are viewed at a wind farm in Colorado City, Texas. Wind power accounted for 8.3 percent of the electricity generated in Texas during 2013.

Wind turbines are viewed at a wind farm in Colorado City, Texas. Wind power accounted for 8.3 percent of the electricity generated in Texas during 2013.

Photo: Spencer Platt, Staff / Getty Images

Photo: Spencer Platt, Staff / Getty Images

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Wind turbines are viewed at a wind farm in Colorado City, Texas. Wind power accounted for 8.3 percent of the electricity generated in Texas during 2013.

Wind turbines are viewed at a wind farm in Colorado City, Texas. Wind power accounted for 8.3 percent of the electricity generated in Texas during 2013.

Photo: Spencer Platt, Staff / Getty Images

Virginia company to build $1.2 billion Panhandle wind farm

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A Virginia-based company is going to build a $1.2 billion, 800 megawatt wind farm in the Texas Panhandle.

Apex Clean Energy will build two 400 megawatt wind projects in Moore County north of Amarillo, starting in 2021 with planned completion of the project set to be in late 2021, according to spokeswoman Cat Strumlauf.

Moore County is part of the Southwest Power Pool, a subset of the larger Eastern Interconnection grid. That is separate from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT, which covers 90 percent of Texans. The county is part of the Eastern Interconnect grid, which extends north through Oklahoma to the Dakotas all the way to the East Coast.

In ERCOT there are currently around 34,000 megawatts of wind and 28,000 megawatts of solar projects under review or development.